Generating Printed Reports
Recollector can produce compact, nicely formatted printed reports from your collection. A printed report can be useful when you are travelling without your computer, and you want to have a description of your collection with you. It can also be useful as documentation, for example, as an accompaniment to an insurance policy.
Though the reports are described here as "printed" reports, the Macintosh operating system's ability to generate PDF (by choosing the PDF choice on the print panel), means that the printed report functionality can also be used to generate a report as a PDF file.View a sample report page ... |
A printed report includes a timestamp (at the footer, left-hand side), is paginated (at the footer, right-hand side), and includes the collection name and subset name, if a subset was used (at the footer, center). The report also includes a cover page with this same information. Each entry in the report has an entry number, in square brackets, in the left margin aligned with the top of the entry. These entry numbers are referenced by the report's indexes.
Producing a printed report with Recollector is easy, as the program provides a wizard that steps you through the configuration choices for your report. To start the wizard, choose File > Generate Printed Report (with Wizard) from Recollector's menu.
The wizard has six steps. You move from step to step with the Next button, or go back using the Back button. You can also click on the Step 1, Step 2, etc. tabs to jump to a different step.
Step 1 - Introduction.
The first step of the wizard is simply an introduction, and shows you what choices you will be making. Normally there are no choices to be made on this first step. But if you have previously saved a report template, you will have the choice here of using the saved template. See the description of report templates at the end of this section of the User's Guide.
View step 1 of the wizard ... |
Step 2 - Scope of the report; font size; layout choices.
In this step of the wizard, make the following choices:
- Whether the report is to include the entire collection, or just the records in a particular subset.
- If a search subset is currently in effect, whether records not in the search subset should be omitted from the report.
- The font size to use in the report.
- Whether the report should try to use a compact format, in which information for multiple fields are put onto the same line (if they will fit).
- Whether the report should justify long (multi-line) text. By default, the program does not justify text.
- Whether a header image should be displayed in the upper margin of each page of the report.
View step 2 of the wizard ... |
Step 3 - Fields to include; image handling.
In this step of the wizard, make the following choices:
- Which fields to include in the report, and in what order. You can start out by using all of the collection's fields, all of the fields in the List view, or all of the fields in a particular Field Profile. (If you plan to generate reports periodically, for example monthly, to document the state of your collection, it is a good idea to create a Field Profile to use for this purpose. Create a field profile named "report" that defines the fields, and the field order, that you want for your reports. Recollector will automatically select the "report" profile as the initial choice for this step in the Wizard.)
You can adjust the initial choice of fields by selecting Choose the set of fields (and field order) now, and then clicking the Choose button (that will appear above the list of fields). This will bring up a panel in which you can adjust the set of fields included, and their order. - Choose whether image fields should include field labels.
- Choose whether to display all the images for a field (when that fields links to more than one image), or just display the first of the images. If you have many images associated with each of your collection records, you may sometimes prefer to produce a more compact report, by only including one image. Turning on this checkbox allows you to do that. In this case, only the first image will be displayed. (You may wish to rearrange the order of your images, to ensure that the one image you want to display is the first one listed.) If your collection contains more than one image field, this choice applies separately to each of those fields, so your report may contain more than one image per record, but only one will be displayed for each image field.
- Specify the maximum width and height for the thumbnail images that will be shown in the report.
View step 3 of the wizard ... |
Step 4 - Sort order.
In this step of the wizard, choose the order in which the records will be printed in the report. Choose between:
- Use the current sort order.
- Sort by a specified field, and whether the sorting should be ascending or descending.
View step 4 of the wizard ... |
Step 5 - Translation.
Most of the text in your report will derive from the text content of your collection: The collection name, the field names and the actual data values in your fields. But there are several bits of text that appear in the report that are generated by the program. These bits of text are in English. However, this step of the wizard lets you use replace those bits of English text by text in whatever language you want. Not all these bits of text are used in every report. The Subset text is only used if you are reporting on a subset. The Totals and Exclude texts are only used if you request a currency-field summary page (described in the next step) to be included with the report. The Index and Entry texts are only used if you request one or more indexes to be generated for your report (described in the next step).
A few of these translation texts have particular requirements, and if the requirements are not met then the original, English text for that element will be used. The requirements are:
- Months - There must be exactly 12 month abbreviations/names, separated by forward-slash characters.
- Totals (pl.) and Exclude (pl.) - The string must contain, within its text, a two-character %d specification. This will be replaced at run time by the appropriate number of records.
View step 5 of the wizard ... |
Step 6 - Indexes and currency/number summary page.
In this step of the wizard, choose whether the report should include indexes, and choose whether the report should include a page that provides totals for the currency-type and number-type fields that are included in the report. You can include zero, one or two indexes. Each index is a list, one row per record, sorted by the indexed field, showing the value of the index field (and, optionally, the value of the ID # field for that record), along with the entry and page number where that record is found in the report.
Your report can optionally include a page that provides a summary for currency-type and number-type fields. This summary page presents totals, across all the records in the report, for each included field whose data-type is currency or number. The currency-field summary page, if requested, appears immediately after the main body of the report (the display of individual records) and just before any index pages.
Note: When computing the sums for currency-type fields, Recollector looks to see whether you have a number-type field whose name is Quantity* (exactly as shown here, with a capital Q and an asterisk character at the end). If such a field is found, then the value in that field is multiplied by the currency-field value when computing totals. This allows you to use a single record to record multiple copies of an item in your collection: As you change the value in the Quantity* field, Recollector will adjust the currency-value totals to reflect the number of copies you have of that particular item. If there is no Quantity* field defined, or the value in that field is empty, a quantity value of 1 is assumed.
To request a currency/number summarypage, turn on the check box at the bottom of the Step 6 page of the wizard.
An additional check box at the bottom of this page in the wizard lets you request that each record start on a new page in the report. By default, the program will put more than one record on a page, as long as the last record on the page still fits entirely on the same page. But if you want each record to be printed on its own page (or pages, if the record doesn’t fit on a single page), then turn on this check box.
View a section of an Index page ... |
View step 6 of the wizard ... |
In the last step of the wizard (Step 6), a Finish button replaces the Next button. Click Finish to begin the generation of the report. To be sure that you are happy with the configuration choices you made, the program asks you whether you would like to generate a test page. If you choose to generate a test page, the program will wait until you have had a chance to examine it, at which point you can request that the full run be started, or that you be taken back to the wizard, where you can make any fine-tuning adjustments to get the report appearance you want.
You also have the option of saving the set of choices that you made in the wizard. These are saved as a named template which you can use, at some future time, to generate a report with the same characteristics. To save your choices as a template, click the Save as a new template radiobutton, and type in a name for the template. When you click either Generate Output or Stay in Wizard, your wizard choices will be remembered in a template. See the section, below, on Report Templates for more information.
View the "Do a test run?" query panel ... |
Report Templates
Collectors will often want to periodically produce reports on their changing collection. If you use the report wizard to generate a report, there are many choices that you make as you proceed through the wizard's steps. You may have to produce several test pages, tinkering with the wizard settings between test runs, to get just the look you want for your report. Saving the wizard settings in a template means that if, let's say a month later, you want to generate a report on your updated collection, you will not have to remember all the detailed choices that you made the last time. You can simply ask to use the saved template, and the new version of your report will have exactly the same layout characteristics as the previous report.
When you save a template for a collection's printed reports, the wizard will contain additional choices on the bottom of the first page. These choices let you choose a template (you can have multiple templates for a collection) and then click the Use Template button to immediately jump to the Report is ready to be generated panel. All the wizard's steps will have been set from the choices saved in the template. You can still choose to Stay in Wizard (if you want to make adjustments to any of the choices specified by the template). If you do make some changes, when you are ready to generate the report you will, if you want, be able to update the template or to make a new template, with a different name, from the current wizard choices. You can also delete a template, if you no longer want to save it.
Templates are per-collection. Since the report wizard utilizes collection-specific information (field names, subset names, profile names, etc.), a report template cannot be used across collections. Each template is saved as part of the collection.